Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Tkacz, Nathaniel

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226192444.001.0001

Cited by 98 publications

(90 citation statements)

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“…Instead we periodically author, read, and share information" (2005, p.40). In a similar vein, Tkacz (2007) argued that whereas the Internet is sometimes used as a tool of oppressive surveillance, Wikipedia provides a positive kind of visibility that makes the political process of creating knowledge open to public view. This distributes power among both the creators of knowledge and its consumers.…”

Section: Other Participation Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

et al. 2012

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Wikipedia has become one of the ten most visited sites on the Web, and the world's leading source of Web reference information. Its rapid success has inspired hundreds of scholars from various disciplines to study its content, communication and community dynamics from various perspectives. This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. We describe our detailed, rigorous methodology for identifying over 450 scholarly studies of Wikipedia. We present the WikiLit website (http://wikilit.referata.com), where most of the papers reviewed here are described in detail. In the major section of this article, we then categorize and summarize the studies. An appendix features an extensive list of resources useful for Wikipedia researchers.

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Section: Other Participation Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

et al. 2012

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“…Bauer & Gegenhuber, 2015;Jeppesen & Lakhani, 2010) to principled attempts at establishing more transparent and participatory forms of organizing (e.g. Tkacz, 2012Tkacz, , 2015Turco, 2016). Second, organizations adopting and applying the label of openness are therefore both free and forced to develop their own understanding -ideal -of what 'open' should mean in their particular empirical context.…”

Section: How Do Strategy-making Practices Labelled As 'Open' Enact Idmentioning

confidence: 99%

Closing for the Benefit of Openness? The case of Wikimedia’s open strategy process

Dobusch

Müller‐Seitz

2017

Organization Studies

157

206

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A growing number of organizations subscribe to ideals of openness in areas such as innovation or strategymaking, supported by digital technologies and fuelled by promises of better outcomes and increased legitimacy. However, by applying a relational lens of inclusion and exclusion, we argue that, paradoxically, certain forms of closure may be necessary to achieve desired open qualities in strategy-making. Analysing the case of Wikimedia, which called for participation in a globally open strategy-making process, we show that openness regarding participation in crafting strategy content depends on certain forms of closure regarding procedures of the strategy-making process. Against this background, we propose a two-dimensional framework of openness, in which content-related and procedural openness are characterized by a combination of open and closed elements.

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“…'Wikipedia is the flagship of peer production and the most celebrated open content project' (Tkacz 2010). It is the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit and this ideal is valued by Wikipedia contributors over and above remaining free from commercial activity.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed as Nathaniel Tkacz notes about these discourses, 'Collaboration is literally everywhere and can be attached to almost anything, immediately giving it a positive value' that is 'beyond that of simply co-labouring' (Tkacz 2010: 41-42). Tkacz (2010) also notes that there is a gap between popular and romanticised accounts of collaboration with how projects such as Wikipedia actually operate in an attempt to enact ideals (Kittur et al 2007;Matei & Dobrescu 2010;Halfaker, Kittur & Riedl 2011;Laniado & Tasso 2011). This process of enacting ideals is ongoing and the encyclopaedia is in transition as both a knowledge producer and web platform.…”

Section: Untangling the Threads: Peer Production And Collaborative Knmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So while scholars like Benkler have given us a romantic view of Wikipedia as being based on peer production, on a system somehow apart from the commercial market, this is not in reality the case (Tkacz 2010). Websites are highly interconnected and this connected nature means that Wikipedia inevitably includes com-mercial actors.…”

Section: Untangling the Threads: Peer Production And Collaborative Knmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit: The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors

Osman

2014

Cult. Unbound

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Wikipedia is often held up as an example of the potential of the internet to foster open, free and non-commercial collaboration. However such discourses often conflate these values without recognising how they play out in reality in a peerproduction community. As Wikipedia is evolving, it is an ideal time to examine these discourses and the tensions that exist between its initial ideals and the reality of commercial activity in the encyclopaedia. Through an analysis of three failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia, this paper highlights the shift in values from the early editorial community that forked encyclopaedic content over the threat of commercialisation, to one that today values the freedom that allows anyone to edit the encyclopaedia.

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Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Cited by 98 publications

References 0 publications

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

Closing for the Benefit of Openness? The case of Wikimedia’s open strategy process

The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit: The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors

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